Salmon Cycle

13 poems for young minds and wise hearts
by Peter Donaldson, March 15, 2002

Egg

I am tiny.
Bright orange.
Salmon egg.
I wait
the long wet winter.
I wait.
The wild
winds wave
in the forest
above the surface
of my dream.
I wait.
I'm very busy.
I wait.
Under
the surface,
of my stream
inside
in between
round gray-green
pebbles, I wait.
Very busy.
I wait.
I am very busy.
I wait.
I wait.

Alevin

Fifty degrees for fifty days.
I am ready
to soften my shell.
I am ready
to uncurl my spine,
ready. Ready, with black-green
big eyes, I am ready.
Ready,
to see the world, I hatch.
Ow.
Oh.

What's outside?
I huddle, I hide.

Pebbles above me,
pebbles below me,
pebbles all around me,
yoke sac feeding,
too fat to float away,
too shy to wonder much
more than why.
I quiver side to side.
What's outside?

I huddle, I hide.

Fry

I swim free,
for the first time,
small fry,
a pine needle with eyes.
I face the current swift
and free, I see
torrents of tiny
excitement everywhere
the activity
of bubbles racing
pebbles, stones, shoulder round
treble notes of adventure
I am older, bolder, indeed,
at the very edge of giggling I feed
fresh and full of speed
I swim,
I swim like everything,
everything,
just to maintain
my indenture here,
to sense what song
I'm meant to sing.
I memorize this smell.

Mother? Father?

Quick! I swim,
darting, dodging, we are
the silent school
the brothers, sisters, cousins and
dozens of other tiny
fingerling
plankton feeding,

and fed upon!

Fingerling

In fingerling school
I've learned some lessons,
King Fisher and Great Blue Heron,
silent, stab, swift.

No time to mourn percentages,
shadows are my universe.
I must swallow it whole or
become that which is
swallowed.

Where cut banks curl
from knuckled root-fists,
where boulders anchor algae insects,
where grandfather cedar
falls, where water pools,
I lay cool,
safe in school,
learning
how larvae drip
from clumsy leaves
to feed me.
Feed me.

Downstream

Freshet floods release!
Freshet spring!
Freshet rise and let me ride
downstream, down canyon
cascade, valley and stream.

Memorize these.

Odor of alderwood,
fragrance of sandstone,
scent of gleaming glacier,
slide of slate and old basalt,
perfume of beaver dam,
rank of iron,
scant sketch of sulfur
bouquet of moss,
fallen log, log boom,
railroad ties and timber buys,
warmer, warmer, aroma of creosote,
concrete backdrop,
pulled asunder, blunder, blunder,
turbines thunder,
bubbles rumble, spillgate tumbles me
upside downstream,
culvert, county, most recent bounty,
farm to field and bovine pee,
dairy, tarry, fertilizer spree, whiff, sniff of industry,
a chemical morass, sentient impasse,
swiftly moving, moving past,
below a surface dusted, like glass,
balm of bridge and half round boulder,
now rain drops, now the bottom of boats,
marina spills, expanded gills,
a shrouded crowded sensory deconstruction,
asphalt, copper, mercury, oil drop,
vociferous olfactory aquatic malaprop,
O, malodorous, big blind river
remember me, all of these,
backwards.

Smolt

I am smolt,
a teenager smart
as a striped bullet.
Silver as a perfect coin, lost,
or tossed in
for good luck.
I stir up the muck, I am so fast.
I turn the tides, I am so sudden.
I learn salt, I am so quick,
smartest trick
in the whole estuary, teeming.
I can eat straight up, 24/7.
I can dodge any danger,
escape any enemy, I can
out-eat, out-compete, so sweet I am
replete
in eelgrass heaven.

And, I can leave when I want to.

Adult

I'm gone.
The ocean seems empty
with far off noises
upwelling, yet it will be
here, along the shelf of continents
in the salt green-blue-blue-green
of current events,
where I must learn to give my life
to the swirling sea of infinite immediacy,
the global patterns of energy, eternally.

Who can say how big
is big?
Who can say what plan is planned for us?
The moon knows.
The sun knows.
The stars, they all know. Ask them.

Brother is dead to Orca.
Sister dead to Sealion.
A thousand cousins fly before me,
a thousand more behind.
We turn, we arch,
we, of the one body,
one purpose, one motion undeterred,
a sweeping curl in Neptune's beard,
the school of the buoyant heart,
the mystery,
the great tribe.

Return

One day,
day length and three years,
an unwaivering,
magnetic trigger
quivers
throughout my body,
as if
attached
to a silver thread,
I feel the tug,
and turn my head

for home.

My face becomes me,
no eyelids with which to rest
the footprint of my body one muscle,
I stride, I glide, I ride the power of my
increasing urge

for home.

Return, return, return,
twenty-two miles a day,
twenty-three, twenty-one,
I have begun the sea-run,
stubbornness and pride,
one stride

for home.

River's Mouth

Beyond mind,
beyond science,
there is a map of my river's mouth colored
in scales of skin rainbow
as in the child's perfect question,
"But where exactly does it end?"

Of all the river mouths
speaking these many languages
into the open sea, this one
voice is for me.

Precision is not
a test but time itself
embedded in the genome.
Home is not
made of plans possible
to understand, but of the long
remembered ritual
with due respect to ancestry.

And all miracles are a legacy of love,
all love testimony to faith,
faith itself, well rehearsed fate.

This is my river,
I enter.

Upstream

I have no time to describe this.
I have no time to eat.
I have no room in my belly
but for the ripening fruits of my fecundity.
I have no thought of mere survival.
I have no comfort but to leap this obstacle.
I take no pleasure in resting.
I have no interest in fishermen's stories.
No interest in old glories.
I have nothing new to teach.
Time
is nature's way of seeing to it
that everything doesn't happen at once.
It is with time alone I compete.
I make no judgment of concrete.
I hear a drum beat, home.
I hear a drum beat, home.
Home is what you expect
to be there when you arrive.
I have no time to speak more of this.

Spawn

This is my reach, the same
leaning alders, the same cedar, fern and stone.

We have come home, a conference of cousins,
reassembled survivors,

two out of three-thousand spawned.
With luck erased we have only certainty

to pace our chance meeting here
to mate, to die.

I lay my body to one side
and flay, flay the gravel loose.

I've never done this before.
I've done this ten-thousand times,

participation here reduced in our bodies
to the purest rhyme.

Swim closer to me.
Swim in synchronicity.

We are partnered choreographers,
selfless now inside the memory of our ancestors,

inside the memory of egg and sperm,
we penetrate, water harden, begin again

all over again.
Hope alone will be safe here.

Bury hope in the gray-green pebbles.

Death

All life is a circle.
A thin eddy
forms above my head.
Where does a circle begin?
Has anyone proved it comes to an end?
My equilibrium loosens.
Night and day fade.
Fade shadows, faint light.
A fallen leaf cups
the surface of another world.
My skin is dry, my eyes fail,
gill muscles frail, like
an ancient fan,
lacquered rice paper
painted
with an old bridge, the bridge
assists a traveler
from one town
crossing over
to another place.
No more swimming.
No more effort.
One more.
One more.
One more.

Spirit

Raven arrives first
and swallows my eyes.
That is why Raven sees in two worlds.

Eagle with his talons tears my flesh
pastured in the power of the sea.
That is why Eagle flies with nobility.

Bear devours the meat of my memory
and the voices of my cousins, too. That is why
Bear has so many dreams in winter.

Deer nibbles on my bones
for calcium and strength. That is why Deer
is fleet footed in the forest.

Cedar-Root attends my dissolving nutrients.
That is why Cedar grows as tall
as the sea is deep and sways
green in the salty wind of the waves
of the mountain rains when the rains come.

Insect people prepare,
they have come to carry away the last
of my generosity. That is why
they are everywhere so happy to be helpful.
That is why they will deposit their own eggs
on the leaves and logs that lean over my stream
to love it as I have loved it.

Come spring,
larvae will drip from green sunshine
to feed the circle I have entered
and will never leave.
Come spring.
I wait.
I wait.
I am very busy.